In general, a refrigerator is used to keep food or beverage in a refrigerated or frozen state for a long time or to cool them rapidly. The refrigerator includes a freezing compartment and a refrigerating compartment opened or closed by individual front doors. To supply cold air to the freezing compartment and the refrigerating compartment, the refrigerator has a compressor, a condenser, a capillary tube and a cooling device to perform a cooling cycle. The compressor compresses a coolant at a high temperature and pressure, and provides thus compressed coolant to the condenser. Then, the condenser condenses the compressed coolant at a low temperature and pressure by releasing heat of the coolant. The condensed coolant is then converted into a liquid state of a low temperature and a high pressure while it passes through the capillary tube. The low-temperature high-pressure condensed coolant is then directed to the cooling device installed at a rear side of the freezing compartment. The coolant sent to the cooling device is converted into a low-pressure state again while it passes through a coolant pipe in the cooling device, and finally evaporates, thereby reducing the temperature in the freezing compartment and the refrigerating compartment.
Recently, with a rise in the standard of living, there have been increasing demands for diversified types of special-purpose refrigerators. Developed to meet such needs are, for example, a kimchi refrigerator equipped with an evaporation pipe and a heating wire for the ripening of kimchi, a cosmetic cooler for storing cosmetics at a low temperature by cooling a cosmetic storage compartment with a relatively small volume by means of a thermoelectric element, and so forth.
Though such various types of special-purpose refrigerators have been developed and commonly utilized, developments have rarely been made upon a storage apparatus for an exclusive use in baby or child care.
If infant food or infant products such as powdered milk, breast milk, medicine and the like are stored in a conventional household refrigerator, they will be soaked with the odors of other foods stored in the refrigerator. As a result, the quality of the infant food or the infant products will be deteriorated and, even worse, hygienic problems may be resulted. Furthermore, in case of using a microwave to warm up, e.g., milk, the milk has to be warmed up after being taken out of the refrigerator, which is very troublesome. Also, purchasing a heating cabinet to warm up the milk or store the warm milk is not economical because the heating cabinet is just for heating and cannot be utilized for other purposes. Furthermore, since the heating cabinet is designed to be used in commercial environments such as hospitals, pharmacies, restaurants, and so forth, it is not suitable for use in home for the purpose of child care.
Moreover, given that a general household sterilizing device is usually designed to be used in sterilizing kitchenware such as dishware or utensils, using it to sterilize infant products such as feeding bottles, handkerchiefs, toys and the like is not proper.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,909,040 discloses a refrigerator provided with a sterilized storage compartment. Though the refrigerator is capable of improving user's convenience by providing various functions, it does not have features suitable for child care because of a large capacity.
Further, there have been proposed many sterilizing devices for infant products, particularly, baby bottles. One of them is, for example, a sterilizer described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,213,776. However, the sterilizing device is only for disinfecting infant products, and it does not have a storage function for storing therein various infant products appropriately.
Therefore, breaking from the conventional conception of electronic appliances designed and distributed for housewives, it is necessary to develop a product capable of storing baby food or products appropriately in various ways, while reducing power consumption that might be increased due to the implementation of various functions.